<https://github.com/adereth/dactyl-keyboard>
There is a PCB kit for the Dactyl to reduce the amount of handwiring:
It really depends on a keyboard - if it is similar to regular one or not. The UHK is pretty similar to regular keyboard - keys are staggered (not ortholinear), there are no additional thumb keys which are also not available on a regular laptop keyboard. After a year with UHK I'm still able to jump between laptop and UHK when needed. Somehow muscle memory "detects" when my hands are on UHK and I start using additional shortcuts which are not available on laptop.
Meanwhile if you'd pick something like Dactyl https://github.com/adereth/dactyl-keyboard, I believe it would be more difficult to jump arround.
P.S. After a year my typing speed on split keyboard is higher compared to laptop.
I hear this recommendation a lot. You can do that, but much better is to get a keyboard with a proper thumb cluster like a kinesis[1], maltron[2], dactyl[3], ...
Much better to put such a common key on the thumb than stress out a pinky. I have a kinesis, and have esc mapped to the 'end' key there; similar positioning is possible on other keyboards. The keyboards I linked are also much more ergonomic than most flat keyboards—important, if you rely on your hands and wrists for your livelihood. Bit expensive, but well worth it.
See the Dactyl and Dactyl Manuform.
Adding the joysticks shouldn't be as difficult as designing the whole thing from scratch.
https://github.com/adereth/dactyl-keyboard
But I wonder if the space of possibilities contains some wacky hidden gems that we are just missing.
A keyboard that looks equally tempting (but involves a lot of soldering and other work) is the Dactyl keyboard (https://github.com/adereth/dactyl-keyboard ).
https://github.com/farrellm/scad-clj
This is biggest project I know of that uses it:
There are a lot of nice alternatives to this, too.
If you are happy spending >$300 on a keyboard, https://shop.keyboard.io/ is definitely worth looking into.
If you are feeling more frugal, there are all kinds of options. Anything "ortholinear" is an improvement. We don't need typewriter-staggered layouts. Anything that puts modifier keys near the thumbs instead of palms is also helpful.
Here are some great open-source designs:
Believe it or not, there are folks out there creating their own curved keyboards. See the following for an example.
There's also a talk I gave a Clojure/conj about it here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uk3A41U0iO4
https://github.com/adereth/dactyl-keyboard
Bonus points for having used Clojure to design it
About 6 years ago I went to his Brooklyn apartment for his birthday. I had never heard of him, but he's distant cousins with my wife's step father and we lived nearby. We get to his apartment and I start looking at the book collection... a lot of interesting math and computer science.
I started talking with him 1 on 1 and at some point he drops that he created the first personal computer. I'm ashamed to admit it, but in the back of my mind I was thinking "oh boy, this guy's not all there." But then he took me to his office and there's a poster of him with the LINC and I'm realizing that I've hit the motherlode of awesome computing history from a primary source.
He then showed me his current project: a working model Broadway stage for his granddaughter. It had to-scale working versions of everything, including the lights and actual mechanisms for drawing the curtains. Then he fired up his Mac with a 30" monitor and showed me that every piece had been laser cut from schematics that he had designed. In raw postscript. The entire thing was programmatically generated from a massive postscript program that was fully parameterized so he could change the dimensions of anything single component and the whole stage would be regenerated.
That programmatic modeling project was a big motivation for the work I've been doing to make parameterized 3d models for ergonomic keyboards (https://github.com/adereth/dactyl-keyboard).
I definitely experienced some cognitive dissonance watching an 82 year old flying around vim editing postscript. It was a trip and it was really inspiring to see someone his age still hacking.